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A jour­ney with­out derailments 

A jour­ney with­out derailments

by Ernie Tee

Ernie Tee is Pro­fes­sor Film His­to­ry & Film Analy­sis at the Dutch Fim Acad­e­my
Arti­cle in Dutch Movie Mag­a­zine Skrien, 1991

How broad the term ‘video’; can (or should?) be stretched, has been proven at the ninth edi­tion of the World Wide Video Fes­ti­val in The Hague. In video art, film and tele­vi­sion are no longer exclud­ed, as well as the use of doc­u­men­tary and nar­ra­tive in the medi­um which is no longer unimag­in­able. Hence, in The Hague they had select­ed two video works as high­lights of the fes­ti­val: ‘Nord Express’ by Rob Rom­bout (who will get a roule­ment in Bel­gium) and Pri­vate Hun­gary by the Hun­gar­i­an Peter Forgács. These are two video works that both have time as sub­ject, the time of trav­el and the time of the fam­i­lylife. ‘Nord Express’ will be dis­cussed on the fol­low­ing pages.

In a vari­ety of ways, the film view­er is like a trav­eller: his trip is one that has a start and an end­point, where in between the route is planned by the sto­ry that is showed. Some­times the sto­ry doesn’t seem to be going fast enough: it slight­ly slows down in its jour­ney. At oth­er times the devel­op­ments fol­low each oth­er at a rapid pace and the jour­ney pro­gress­es well. There is always a degree of aware­ness of its final des­ti­na­tion, but both this and the route towards the end is uncer­tain: the film is high­ly unpre­dictable, and its appeal large­ly derives from this uncer­tain­ty about the course of events.

‘Nord Express’, a vide­ofilm by Rob Rom­bout, a Dutch video artist work­ing in Bel­gium, fol­lows the route of the Paris-Moscow express train. The film opens with footage of Gare du Nord and ends, near­ly an hour lat­er, with the arrival at the Moscow cen­tral sta­tion. In the mean­time about two days pass, the dura­tion of the trip. How­ev­er, ‘Nord Express’ isn’t the sort of film where the excite­ment is caused by the capri­cious­ness of the trip, by an uncer­tain des­ti­na­tion. There are no adven­tur­ous wan­der­ings for the view­er in this film. On the con­trary, the start- and end­point are fixed in advance, and no cues are giv­en to assume that the rail­way trav­eller will not make it, or the express train will nev­er reach its des­ti­na­tion. The jour­ney laid before the view­er is not pre­sent­ed as a trip full of unpre­dict­ed events, but rather as a well-arranged trip by the way of the Russ­ian cap­i­tal as its endpoint.

Extract of Nord Express, by Rob Rom­bout, 1990

Scat­ter­ing

How­ev­er, ‘Nord Express’ does bring about a spe­cial expe­ri­ence due to the fact that Rom­bout hasn’t made the trip, but trav­el­ling itself the sub­ject of his film. ‘Nord Express’ breathes the atmos­phere of a long train jour­ney, where the trav­el spec­ta­tor, for the time being, should try to enter­tain him­self. Dur­ing such a long trip every­thing you encounter is scat­ter­ing: con­ver­sa­tions with ran­dom fel­low trav­ellers, with train offi­cials, the pass­ing land­scape, sta­tions, cities, and so on. No derail­ments, no mys­te­ri­ous dis­ap­pear­ances, no strange char­ac­ters impos­ing upon you, in short, no excess­es: every­thing is quite nor­mal in the Nord Express from Paris to Moscow, and at the same time all those ordi­nary events on such a jour­ney are by all means entertaining.

Through an untrou­bled view on what might hap­pen before your eyes, you will cer­tain­ly not be bored as a trav­eller on a long train jour­ney like this. Rombout’s cam­era does indeed car­ry the view of some­one who does not with­draw him­self into the bore­dom of a long jour­ney, but car­ries the view of curios­i­ty at the chat­ter of the peo­ple around him, to a rail­road house along the route, to a pass­ing wall paint­ing, to what the train stew­ardess has to say. More­over, the view is cer­tain­ly not one of dis­in­ter­est: it is not a wan­der­ing gaze, first here, then there. That would be the per­spec­tive of some­one won­der­ing how on earth to kill the bore­dom. No, the view in ‘Nord Express’ is almost a study: almost every frame is in move­ment, lock­ing the images of the pas­sen­gers, the engi­neer, the rail­way employ­ee, the plat­form, and of the out­side sur­round­ings. But in its per­fect seri­ous­ness the cam­era cap­tures the most light-heart­ed top­ics: the painter­philoso­pher, who made a wall paint­ing at one of the sta­tions, his house which is right next to the rail­way, the Pol­ish fish­er­man who makes a short train ride across the bor­der almost every day to cast his fish­ing rod in a lake near­by, the train stew­ardess who is seat­ed next to a vase with fad­ed tulips telling about her wish to fill her life with arrang­ing flow­ers, Nem­sji­novs­ka, the Russ­ian gate­keep­er, who clears the rails from snow with a broom, a med­ical stu­dent from Cameroon; all of them every­day peo­ple with every­day sto­ries that can make a long train jour­ney so enjoyable.

« From time to time black and white images from the past are shown. But this his­tor­i­cal digres­sion doesn’t form didac­tic images con­cern­ing the rail­way; they are as equal­ly short as incom­plete, they are acci­den­tal, as loose thoughts that come to mind when pass­ing the sta­tions and cities through which the express train is head­ing off to the East. »

Equal­ly light-heart­ed is the ‘his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive’ that accom­pa­nies the Nord Express. From time to time black and white images from the past are shown: the first rail­way works, the open­ing of the cen­tral sta­tion in War­saw, rail­way work­ers in the Russ­ian bor­der town of Brest who swap the bases of the trains. But this his­tor­i­cal digres­sion doesn’t form didac­tic images con­cern­ing the rail­way; they are as equal­ly short as incom­plete, they are acci­den­tal, as loose thoughts that come to mind when pass­ing the sta­tions and cities through which the express train is head­ing off to the East. For exam­ple, when the train arrives in Berlin (the old, divid­ed Berlin), we only see a his­tor­i­cal pic­ture of the con­struc­tion of the Wall, then a present-day image of its destruc­tion, and final­ly two young­sters who are sell­ing small stone left­overs of the East Berlin Wall. And whilst the train enters War­saw, we see images of a par­ty from the 1950s that took place at plat­form three: Plat­form three was the place where Pol­ish film­mak­ers at the time cel­e­brat­ed their Hap­py new year. The small out­ings to the past are like stretch­ing the legs dur­ing long jour­neys. They are the images, impres­sions, from an acci­den­tal trav­eller, inci­den­tal­ly, not those of a doc­u­men­tary maker.

Extract of Nord Express, by Rob Rom­bout, 1990

Vis­i­ble time

Time pass­es by, but for a trav­eller nev­er unno­ticed (unless he is in a deep sleep). The course of time dur­ing a trip is always set in a fixed frame­work, name­ly the frame­work deter­mined by the time of depar­ture and arrival. At what time that is exact­ly, is irrel­e­vant. More impor­tant is the ques­tion of how far we already are, how long the trip is yet to be, how far we are removed from our des­ti­na­tion. At each stop the exact time is checked, by which the film helps us by show­ing the exact sta­tion and time in the sub­ti­tles. The course of time is there­fore not obfus­cat­ed, but, as required by a trav­eller, con­tin­u­ous­ly reg­is­tered, made vis­i­ble. This visu­al­iza­tion of the pass­ing of time also hap­pens in oth­er ways. By using flashy video tech­niques the evening sud­den­ly ‘falls’ as the train leaves a sta­tion: the after­noon blends into a ‘nuit améri­caine’; No hard cut, and also no ellip­ti­cal time jump: although the dark­ness may have entered (i.e. we went from the after­noon into the evening), the time-spa­tial con­ti­nu­ity of the mov­ing train is intact. The same train, the same hous­es in the back­ground are still in the frame, except now the liv­ing rooms lights are on. A sim­i­lar effect is used a lit­tle lat­er in the film when a train win­dow frame is used and the same smooth­ing takes place. A sur­pris­ing tech­nique, by which the course of time is abstract­ed by the time- space in the dis­played scene, an abstrac­tion that also belongs to the expe­ri­ence of trav­eller (who indeed isn’t won­der­ing; ‘what time?’ but ‘how long still?’). This tech­nique is not like the ellip­ti­cal edit­ing, an indi­ca­tion for the pas­sage of time itself.

‘Nord Express’ is the jour­ney of the express train Paris-Moscow itself. When in the last frame the night­ly facade of the cen­tral sta­tion of Moscow is shown, the view­er real­izes that the jour­ney has come to an end. The feel­ing of hav­ing made a sat­is­fac­to­ry, long jour­ney dom­i­nates, dur­ing which, thank good­ness, noth­ing strange, noth­ing grave hap­pened. But this assur­ance was already giv­en to the view­er ear­li­er in the film, in the con­ver­sa­tion with a group of tourists from Arme­nia, that had report­ed to him: ‘Tout est bien, tout est nor­mal‘.

Extract of Nord Express, by Rob Rom­bout, 1990